Curse Not the King (22 page)

Then, at two o'clock in the morning, the Empress signalled that she wished to leave. Immediately the great entrance to the Taurus Palace was crowded with guests, and on the arm of her smiling host Catherine Alexeievna walked slowly among them, pausing to exchange a word of greeting, stopping as always, to joke with her lifelong friend Leo Naryshkin, whose ancient rivalry with Potemkin had mellowed into sympathy and admiration.

“My dear Leo,” she said fondly, while he bent and kissed her hand, and when he looked at her she started, suddenly aware that the gay companion of over thirty years was in reality a tired old man. For a brief second while they smiled and murmured pleasantries as they had always done, the spectacle of age and death became personified in that one man who held so many memories of her early life. Her genuine affection for him saw that Potemkin's lavish feast had taxed his strength, that the humorous, loving gaze was dimmed by tiredness, and an extraordinary spasm of nostalgic weakness seized her, bringing the tears to her eyes. If she had ever loved him, ever rewarded that selfless, unswerving devotion with the gift of herself which had been so many men's acknowledged prize, perhaps her later years might have been dignified by serenity and love, instead of plagued by the desires of youth. If she had gone to Leo, perhaps Potemkin and his successors would never have come into her life … there might have been no need of such a man as Plato Zubov.…

“You are fatigued, my friend,” she said gently. “My good Potemkin has overwhelmed us all this night. Go home, Leo. Go home and go to bed.…”

Then she turned to her old lover, to her companion-in-arms who had wielded the sword for her in many wars and laid his laurels humbly at her feet, to him whose genius had been the treasure of her reign, and whose love for her was to survive as one of the greatest passions of all time.

“I thank you,” she said, “for the glory of this evening, as well as for so many other things. Good night, my dear Grisha.…” and at the sound of that familiar diminutive, the great Potemkin fell on his knees and holding her hands against his breast, he wept. No one among the hundreds who witnessed that scene knew whether he shed tears of sorrow or of triumph.

Long after Catherine Alexeievna's carriage had passed out of sight Potemkin stood alone on the steps of his great palace, the folds of his black cloak stirring in a sharp night breeze, staring out along the road she had taken.

When he returned to the Palace, Paul wished his wife good night with a finality that left her in no doubt as to his disinclination to discuss the evening, and shut himself up in his study. There he planned to write to Katya Nelidoff, but though the paper and quills were laid out on his desk, and the pleading sentences of her last letter echoed in his mind, he sat staring at the blank sheets of paper having done no more than write the heading.

“If you knew the impatience with which I wait for your letters you would correspond more often,” she had reproached him, and remembering these words, he strove to formulate his thoughts, to drag them away from the great problems of that night, to dismiss the growing preoccupation with politics and his own destiny which so filled his mind that the figure of Catherine Nelidoff had almost receded into oblivion in the past weeks.

She missed him desperately, her letters said, and the note of loneliness and unease grew stronger in them as the intervals between his answers lengthened.

“My sweet Katya, I have been lost without you,” he wrote, driving his pen slowly, aware that while true in one respect, the sentiment was yet a lie.

Physically lost, deprived of the solace of her unquestioning surrender to his wishes, he had even gone to Marie Feodorovna's bed since their stay in the capital began, but the gentle, womanly interests of his mistress had never wholly claimed his mind. She had come to him at Gatchina, assuaged his abysmal loneliness and diverted the destructive powers of his sick temperament; she was at once a soporific and a stimulant. But she was not quite part of the great world in which his exalted birth and heritage had placed him.

She belonged to his home, to quiet evenings of domestic peace, to interludes of passion which gave way to forgetfulness and sleep. In illness, solitude and neglect, she was the chosen solace of his life, he thought, while his quill laboured to finish the letter and his mind strained towards the puzzle of Potemkin and the consequences to himself. And she would remain so, he decided, signing and sanding the paper, for as long as he lived. But at that hour and time his destiny as Czarevitch came first.

His mother, always the principal enemy, joined now by his beautiful, treacherous son Alexander, had to be overcome, and every instinct warned him that the reckoning would not be long delayed. The wishes of the Empress, the guilty fears of her Court, and the persistent malice of all those who had despised and persecuted him throughout his life were all arraigned against him, barring his way to the throne of his father.

Before much longer he should know whether Gregory Potemkin could still be counted among that company.

The next morning a messenger delivered a personal letter from the Empress to her Minister. Potemkin's hands were trembling when he broke the seal; he had not gone to bed that night, pacing nervously up and down in his deserted palace in the midst of the ruins of his tremendous feast, waiting for the sign he knew would come. He read Catherine's note twice without speaking, and then sat down very slowly in the chair a frightened servant set for him.

“She thanks me,” he murmured aloud. “She thanks me for the entertainment. For my farewell feast.… And she orders me to leave Petersburg.…”

Carefully Potemkin folded the small square of paper, and placed it in the breast pocket of his dressing-gown, as he had done with every scrap of writing she had ever sent him.

Then he leant back in his chair and laughed, laughed with all the roaring volume of his great barrel chest, while the tears streamed out of his one eye and seeped painfully from under the shrivelled sunken lid covering the empty socket where Alexis Orlov had blinded him for love of Catherine Alexeievna nearly thirty years before.

By the end of September the Czarevitch and his household returned to Gatchina, leaving the Empress's favourite victor at Petersburg.

Paul had remained in the capital long enough to witness the departure of his fallen enemy, ostensibly setting out to conduct the peace treaty with the Turks at Jassy, but in fact retiring from Catherine's presence at her order. Then turning to Rastopchine, the Czarevitch took his arm and walked slowly away from the window where they had stood to watch Potemkin's great coach taking him into exile.

“It is well, my friend,” he said quietly; and glancing into his master's face, Rastopchine saw the savage triumph in his expression and decided that those who trembled at the thought of Paul's accession did so with good cause.

“Thank God, Highness,” he said. “He will never return to power again.”

“One less for me to fight, Rastopchine. And I've waited twenty years to see this day.”

Quite suddenly he smiled, with that rare gleam of human gentleness.

“Thank God, indeed,” Paul said slowly. “Now we can go home.”

At Gatchina Catherine Nelidoff was waiting, and he held her in his arms once more, happiness filling his heart, forgetting that he had ever been able to exist without her. That first night she clung to him, crying with relief that in spite of her fears he had returned and proved himself as loving as before; for several days their old life together was resumed; their days passed walking or riding in the parkland, the evenings were spent in the privacy he loved so much, reading aloud or talking of the future, and if she noticed that this obsession with his destiny seemed stronger since his visit to the capital, Paul's mistress only listened and said nothing, stifling a persistent nagging fear that the coming battle for his father's throne might serve to separate them if it did not end in failure and death for her lover.

“Oh, God,” she prayed when he had left her and gone to his own room before daybreak, “Merciful God, protect him! Let him stay with me, where he is safe …” It was a hopeless prayer, frantically repeated in the weeks that followed, when the spell of their reunion faded, and the Czarevitch spent hours in company with his commander, Araktchéief, drawing up military rules for his garrison, sitting in judgment upon prisoners, many of them civilians convicted of some infringement of the lunatic regulations governing the palace and the town it dominated.

And when she pleaded for Araktchéief's victim, Paul refused her coldly, until the weight of his displeasure and the absences which followed forced her to acquiesce, to be content with loving Paul and following him blindly, unable to curb his impulses or break the influence of those around him who encouraged them. And her former friend Koutaïssof was foremost among these.

Then in October of that year a courier galloped into the palace grounds and hurried to the Czarevitch, where he sat dining quietly with his mistress.

The message, which he read to her, was brief, but the contents were decisive.

Gregory Potemkin had suddenly abandoned the peace negotiations at Jassy. Consumed by rage, heartbreak and rebellion, he had set out in his travelling carriage, taking his niece and faithful mistress, Branicka, with him, and thundered towards the town of Octakov, the scene of his great military siege and triumph in the late war.

Whatever the motives that impelled him to travel back over the way of his old glory, his destination was never reached.

He leant out of the window and ordered his coachman to stop some thirty miles outside of Jassy. Immediately the vehicles following with his servants and possessions halted behind the huge carriage: there, on a bed of coats piled up under a sheltering tree, with his great head resting on Branicka's breast, Potemkin, Prince of Taurus, died by the roadside.

“Protassof!”

“Yes, Madame?”

The Empress's confidante hurried into the study where her mistress sat writing at her desk, and curtsied to the ground.

The Countess was a model of propriety in appearance and behaviour, never by word or deed did she betray her deadly knowledge of Catherine's weaknesses and her adroitness in making the means of pandering to them available.

But for almost seven years this function of her office had not been exercised; the death of Potemkin had left Plato Zubov in a position of unchallenged favour; his infatuated mistress hastened to take the honours of the dead and bestow them upon the living; the former Captain of the Guard was now a Minister and a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

In that year of 1796 all Russia grovelled at his feet.

“Protassof,” the Empress said after a moment, and in that moment sanded a long document, shaking the golden sprinkler vigorously, her eyes still lowered to the paper; “Protassof, be good enough to admit the Grand Duke Alexander. And give orders that I am not to be disturbed.”

While she waited, Catherine read over part of what she had just written, and then leant back in her chair and rubbed her aching wrist. When he entered, she looked up, her face illumined by a smile of tenderness and pride, and extended her arms to enfold him.

“Alexander,” she murmured fondly, while he kissed her forehead and her hands, “dear boy, come and help me out of this chair. I've taken root at my desk.”

Paul's son was now as broadly proportioned as he was tall, and he drew his grandmother to her feet: with one strong arm supporting her and the other encircling her waist, he led her to the sofa she indicated.

With a sigh, Catherine sat down, her tired heart pounding after the exertion of bearing her own great weight for even a few moments.

“Bring me that document on my desk, the top one, there. Thank you; now sit here by me.”

Alexander, whose quick keen eyes had managed to read a few lines of the paper while pretending to search for it, handed it to her with an expression of smiling innocence, and a sense of wild excitement surging behind that courteous, false exterior.

He looked older than his nineteen years, for his handsome face was naturally grave and his blue eyes considered the world through an impenetrable filter of cunning, ambition, cowardice and deceit. His earliest instincts had been those of secrecy, characterized by an intense dislike of being understood or seeing his most unimportant motive revealed before the minds of others. He had set out to be an enigma, hiding from all men the true reason for his words and actions, pretending ceaselessly, with the desperate duplicity of a self-acknowledged rogue, subconsciously hoping that the day would dawn when he might perhaps delude himself.

The process was a slow one, but it was sure. Seated beside his grandmother, one arm linked affectionately through hers, Alexander thought of the contents of her will, which he had only glimpsed, and persuaded his conscience that his fierce, greedy joy was justified. Meanwhile his self-discipline enabled him to sit and talk of trivialities without betraying his impatience.

He told Catherine some details of his day, and she listened smiling, clutching that all-important paper in her plump, jewelled fingers.

“How is the Grand Duchess?” she asked him.

“In excellent health,” he answered, on behalf of the Baden princess who had become his wife two years before.

“And you are really happy, Alexander?” His fine fair brows arched in surprise, but the ready smile and glib reply were there.

“But of course, Madame. Most happy.” Sexually cold and utterly self-centred, his feelings for his wife were a comfortable mixture of indifference and content.

“I'm very pleased with you, Alexander. In all you do, you reach my expectations and conform to the standards of excellence I have set for you. Deliberately set, since the responsibilities I shall leave you will demand the utmost talent and devotion you can give. You know that, my dear boy?”

“Yes,” he murmured.